Operators of mobile systems, such as Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) and its offspring including LTE (Long Term Evolution) and LTE-Advanced, are increasingly relying on wireless small cell radio access networks (RANs) in order to deploy indoor (as well as dense outdoor) voice and data services to enterprises and other customers. Such small cell RANs typically utilize multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communications with multiple users using radio frequency (RF) signals and sharing available system resources such as bandwidth and transmit power.
One type of RAN architecture that is currently deployed includes a network of radio nodes connected to a centralized access controller or aggregation node. One example of such a controller or node is the Services Node available from Spidercloud, Wireless Inc. The centralized Services Node provides a number of advantages that help meet stringent key performance indicator (KPI) requirements. It also has dedicated hardware that is used to provide frequency synchronization between radio nodes in order to facilitate UMTS and LTE airlink performance.